He was getting
hardened to the game, and played it with coolness and precision.
All through that day the little band retreated through an enemy's
country, watchful, alert, almost nervous. There were absurdly few of
them--a characteristic of that frontier warfare which the sallow, silent
leader had waged nearly all his life. And in the evening there was not
peace.
Fortune is a playful soul. She keeps men waiting a lifetime, and then,
when it is too late, she suddenly opens both her hands. Seymour Michael
had waited twenty years for one of those chances of easy distinction
which seemed to fall to the lot of all his comrades in arms. This chance
was vouchsafed to him on the last evening he ever passed in an enemy's
country--when it was too late--when that which he did was no more than
was to be expected from a man of his experience and fame.
The little band was attacked at sunset by the victorious savages who had
annihilated the advance column three days earlier, and with half the
number of men, fatigued and hungry, Seymour Michael beat them back and
cut his way to the south.
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